Synopsis

Part cookbook—with more than 120 enticing recipes—part culinary history, part inquiry into the evolution of an industry, Milk is a one-of-a-kind book that will forever change the way we think about dairy products.

Anne Mendelson, author of Stand Facing the Stove, first explores the earliest Old World homes of yogurt and kindred fermented products made primarily from sheep’s and goats’ milk and soured as a natural consequence of climate. Out of this ancient heritage from lands that include Greece, Bosnia, Turkey, Israel, Persia, Afghanistan, and India, she mines a rich source of culinary traditions.

Mendelson then takes us on a journey through the lands that traditionally only consumed milk fresh from the cow—what she calls the Northwestern Cow Belt (northern Europe, Great Britain, North America). She shows us how milk reached such prominence in our diet in the nineteenth century that it led to the current practice of overbreeding cows and overprocessing dairy products. Her lucid explanation of the chemical intricacies of milk and the simple home experiments she encourages us to try are a revelation of how pure milk products should really taste.

The delightfully wide-ranging recipes that follow are grouped according to the main dairy ingredient: fresh milk and cream, yogurt, cultured milk and cream, butter and true buttermilk, fresh cheeses. We learn how to make luscious Clotted Cream, magical Lemon Curd, that beautiful quasi-cheese Mascarpone, as well as homemade yogurt, sour cream, true buttermilk, and homemade butter. She gives us comfort foods such as Milk Toast and Cream of Tomato Soup alongside Panir and Chhenna from India. Here, too, are old favorites like Herring with Sour Cream Sauce, Beef Stroganoff, a New Englandish Clam Chowder, and the elegant Russian Easter dessert, Paskha. And there are drinks for every season, from Turkish Ayran and Indian Lassis to Batidos (Latin American milkshakes) and an authentic hot chocolate.

This illuminating book will be an essential part of any food lover’s collection and is bound to win converts determined to restore the purity of flavor to our First Food.

Excerpt

Apple-Onion Cream Soup Ingredients: 4 to 6 thick slices of bacon, coarsely diced 3 to 4 tart, juicy apples, pared, quartered, cored, and coarsely diced 4 tablespoons butter 4 large onions, coarsely diced 3 cups good beef broth, or as needed 6 to 8 whole allspice berries, lightly bruised 1 cup heavy cream 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste Freshly ground black pepper A dash of lemon juice (optional) 1 teaspoon carraway seeds, lightly bruised (optional) Cream soups are best when they have something more than creaminess going for them. A good cold-weather example is this robust sweet-tart combination of apples--use a good local fall variety in season--and onions with some crisp bacon for counterpoint. It's best when made with a strong, full-flavored beef broth. 1. Cook the bacon slowly in a heavy skillet to render out all the fat. When it is crisp, scoop it out of the fat and drain on paper towels. 2. Sauté the diced apples over medium heat in the same skillet, stirring occasionally, until cooked through. Scoop out a few spoonfuls of the apples for garnish and set aside. 3. Melt the butter in a large heavy saucepan. When it foams and sizzles, add the chopped onions and sauté very patiently over low heat, stirring frequently, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the onions are well softened and starting to brown. Scoop out a few spoonfuls for garnish and set aside with the reserved apples. 4. Add the rest of the apples to the onions, pour in the broth, add the allspice, and simmer until everything is nearly dissolved, 10 to 15 minutes. Fish out and discard the allspice.5. Pureé the soup in batches in a blender or food processor, making sure to leave the texture slightly coarse. 6. Return the soup to the pot, heat to a boil, and stir in the cream. Let it come to a boil again, add the salt and a grinding of pepper, and taste for seasoning; if it seems too bland, squeeze in a little lemon juice. If it is too thick for your taste, thin it with some hot water. 7. Serve garnished with the reserved bacon, apple, and onion. I like a scattering of carraway seed as well. YIELD: 8 to 9 cups

About Anne Mendelson

Anne Mendelsongrew up in southeastern Pennsylvania in an area where small dairy farms were once common. In addition to Stand Facing the Stove (a history of The Joy of Cooking and its authors), she collaborated with chef-writer Zarela Martínez on three cookbooks exploring Mexican cuisine. She has written for Gourmet,Saveur, and The New York Times. Mendelson lives in northern New Jersey.

Author Q&A

Q: You’re a culinary historian. Of all the interesting food staples, why did you choose to write about milk?A: To me, it’s the most magical shape-shifter of all ingredients. And something that takes us back before the dawn of history. People thousands of years ago could have told us that one batch of milk holds in itself the makings of cream, skim milk, yogurt, sour cream, butter, buttermilk, panir, all kinds of fresh cheeses, and much else. Even leaving out the whole realm of ripened or aged cheeses, milk as it comes from the world’s milch animals (cows, camels, goats, sheep, mares, and more) has always been a treasure-house of culinary possibilities that no one would guess from the surface.

Q: You call milk the “First Food.” Can you explain this?A: It’s the first thing any newborn mammal tastes and takes pleasure in after emerging from the womb and starting to breathe on its own. Of course, we’re the only mammal that has ever experimented with the milk of other species.

Q: It seems many children get calcium/dairy from products like Go-Gurt (yogurt in a tube) or strawberry-flavored milk. What dairy products should parents introduce their children to and do you have any suggestions on how to make milk more palatable to children?A: That children (or adults) positively need dairy products is a myth. Sure, they’re good sources of protein and calcium, but so are many other foods. In my opinion, trying to pour milk into kids by the quart is one of the big nutritional mistakes of modern times. If they dislike plain milk, buttermilk, unflavored yogurt, and so forth, don’t worry and don’t push it. And don’t get them started on sweetened junk versions of dairy products. When they’re a little older, either they’ll like the taste of plain, real milk and fresh milk products in their own right or they won’t. (By the way, some children who scorn milk in other forms really like cheese.)

Q: Can people who are lactose-intolerant cook from this book?A: Yes! There are degrees of lactose intolerance. Most people can tolerate at least small amounts. Anyone with a very severe case needs to follow a doctor’s advice, but others should explore the recipes using milk products cultured with lactic-acid bacteria that remove most of the lactose -- yogurt, cultured buttermilk, fresh cheeses drained of whey. In fact, most of the world’s dairying peoples have always consumed milk in those forms instead of drinking it fresh.

Q: How different is the milk we buy at grocery stores and supermarkets from milk straight from the cow?A: The difference is like night and day. If you could follow most commercial milk on its journey from farm to store dairy case, you would see it at the processing plant being pumped from tanker trucks into giant silos. From there it enters a huge continuous-feed system where -- among a barrage of other processes -- the original whole milk is taken apart via centrifuge; the separated cream and skim milk are recombined not to the proportions of true whole milk but by arbitrary percentages; the mixture is pasteurized at (usually) 161 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds and pumped through the tiny apertures of a homogenizer to smash the butterfat globules into smithereens too small to collect in a cream layer; and the pasteurized homogenized milk is filled into immediately sealed cartons and dispatched for delivery to retail stores.

It may reach your refrigerator as long as a week after milking. It doesn’t even begin to suggest the beautiful, indescribable freshness and creaminess of good new milk -- chiefly destroyed by homogenization and the long interval between milking and consumption.

Q: Is that a consumer’s only choice?A: Not now that small-scale dairies are springing up in many parts of the country. Unlike the big outfits, they can use older and simpler processing methods that don’t alter the milk as drastically. For instance, pasteurizing for a longer time at a lower temperature, and omitting the distorting step of homogenization. (Unhomogenized milk is often sold as “creamline.”) The milk is distributed locally, not over huge distances, and arrives at retail venues much fresher. Look for it at farmers’ markets and a growing range of specialty food shops, even a few supermarket chains.

Q: Why do you think there has been a resurgence of interest in local and small-scale dairy products?A: Same reasons as the rest of the ongoing renaissance in small-scale local farming. More and more consumers understand the difference in quality between factory-scale and -- well, human-scale food production.

Q: You grew up in a corner of southeastern Pennsylvania where small dairy farms were once common. How did this contribute to your work on MILK?A: I wasn’t particularly curious about milk until I was curious about food in general -- and by that time, those farms were vanishing fast. What’s really stuck in my memory over the years is the sights and sounds of cows going about cow business -- lots of different breeds, in those days. (The area is almost completely suburbanized now, and the few farms that are left have all Holstein-Friesians, those big black-and-white cows.) I remember cow noises coming from the Guernsey herd on the other side of our field, where the golf course is now. Cows grazing in little meadows next to little creeks. Cows settling down under willow trees to chew the cud on a hot day. The smell of the manure that all our farmer neighbors spread over the fields at spring planting. Late in the afternoon, a dozen assorted-breed cows traipsing in file back to the barn for milking. Though I don’t dwell on my own memories in the book, those animals as part of that landscape represented something valuable -- valuable to all of us -- that’s almost been lost.

Q: Is there anything that you regret leaving out of MILK?A: It may sound like same-old same-old, but I wish I’d mentioned the frightening loss of genetic diversity among dairy cattle. Artificial insemination, coupled with insane emphasis on higher and higher yields per cow, means enormous demand for semen from a comparative handful of sires. So most American dairy farmers are working with Holstein-Friesian cows that are tremendously inbred -- which reinforces known liabilities of the breed, such as difficulty taking in enough food energy to keep up with the huge volumes of milk the “best” cows secrete.

Q: How do you predict Americans’ relationship with dairy products will evolve over the next 25years?A: I’d expect both better and worse. My pessimist self predicts that (a) the already difficult economic pressures of mainstream commercial dairying will worsen, leading to ever more extreme efforts to wring the last possible drop of tasteless milk out of overstressed cows; (b) if you think strawberry yogurt candy and pre-flavored probiotic milk drinks are niche-marketing gimmickry gone crazy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The optimist in me knows that small artisanal dairies with well cared-for animals are not a flash in the pan. Goats’ milk, sheep’s milk, milk from different cow breeds and maybe even water buffaloes are going to become better known to people who care about food. Simple products like cultured buttermilk and cottage cheese are going to appear in versions a hundred times better than the usual supermarket selection. The catch is that they won’t be cheap.

Q: What has been your biggest discovery in working on MILK?A: Realizing that for most of the world’s peoples who have kept herd animals, milk and fresh dairy products have always been the absolute opposite of bland and boring. Cooks from the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent just about wrote the book on milk-based cuisines, long before dairying got to western Europe. There’s a whole universe of strong, vivid, exciting flavors out there that will be completely new to people brought up in narrowly Western dairy-food traditions.

Q: MILK includes recipes as diverse as Southern Buttermilk Pie, Chinese “Fried Milk,“ LiptauerCheese, and Mango Lassi, to name a few. What’s your favorite recipe in the book?A: A zucchini salad with yogurt dressing -- you saute grated zucchini with a lot of scallions, toss with yogurt, and serve garnished with plenty of fresh dill.